This past week, most news organizations reported that Twitter had been hacked on Thursday, causing wide-spread outage to the micro-blogging service. As it turns out, this was wholly inaccurate as Twitter was the victim of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, not hacked.
Why is this important? Because it is two different things and news organizations who pride themselves on being the trust agents of the media should know the difference and report it. On MSNBC, the anchor had an on-air argument with the guest who tried to explain what a DoS means for the security of her banking Web site. She clearly did not understand the difference between hacking and DoS and was doing her audience no service by trying to equate the two.
Simply, hacking is someone breaking into your home and messing with your furniture. A DoS is someone calling all his friends to pile outside your front door to prevent anyone from ringing your doorbell and being let in. One is a security concern; the other a major inconvenience.
Not every computer network is a “hack.” It is the same thing as calling every human death a murder. It is not always true and scares people. It is about time the media understands the difference and quit scaring their audience. Just use the analogy above and people will understand the difference.
